Thanksgiving has come and gone and millions of people enjoyed family get togethers, as they sat around indulging on the Thanksgiving delicacies and celebrating family traditions.
Makes me wonder how many individuals are really traditionalists. Healthy traditions are wonderful things to pass on to younger family members, but what about negative traditions we pass on without realizing we are doing it? If you think about it, negative traditions are not the kind of things we desire to pass on.
Negative Traditions can handicap or disable an individual by not allowing the individual to think freely about his or her action. Traditionalists tend to censor others from being themselves and speaking freely to others. They are narrow minded individuals, evidenced by how they view life and the world.
In the days of Christopher Columbus, a committee advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain about why they thought it was impossible for a person to seek out new land said, “…so many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.” The committee thought there were no more valuable land beyond their traditional way of seeing things and they attempted to censor Christopher Columbus. He sailed to the other side of the world to convince those traditional minded individuals to open up and view life in a different way.
Looking at a person who allows himself to be control by negative tradition is a travesty. Close mindedness can not and will not encourage change and growth for the betterment of the individual who is determine to change.
What causes a person or a group of people to insist that someone follow their narrow and negative view point, simply because it is cloaked in tradition? We must be aware of this tendency and examine it carefully when it arises.
Tradition, in a positive sense is actually good for connecting families together which in turn strengthens families ties. But from a negative prospect, tradition is just as harmful as cancer. We must question what a person’s motive is when they attempt to convince or encourage us to adopt their view point through a traditional mind set. We mustn’t continue to follow along blindly because of tradition.
stay tuned for part 2